Can the U.S. have its cake and eat it too, in higher education?

The United States has long been a top destination for foreign students and Silicon Valley companies are filled with men and women who came for schooling and stayed to start companies.

On Thursday, a seminar at UC Berkeley will argue that the U.S. is now losing ground in the global competition for talent and reject the notion that it is natives against newcomers when it comes to access to higher education.

In the abstract to their presentation John Aubrey Douglass and Richard Edelstein from the Center for Studies in Higher Education write that:

Attracting talent in a global market and increasing degree production rates of the domestic population are not mutually exclusive goals. Indeed, they will be the hallmarks of the most competitive economies.

The 90-minute seminar, which begins at noon and is open to the public, comes at a time of rising fees and shrinking resources at California’s public institutions of higher learning. Check the CSHE Web site for detail or to read the papers that inform the researchers’ remarks.